


Into the Jaws, Into the Mouth, and Deeper Into Hell

by TheWyldeWynd



Category: Far Cry 5, Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Beware Here There Be Monsters, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Horror in general, Human Experimentation, Insanity, Mind the Tags, Other, Psychological Horror, Sexual Assault, Survival Horror, Torture, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 22:48:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16481210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWyldeWynd/pseuds/TheWyldeWynd
Summary: Deputy Robin Baird's never been one for horror movies.  She's never seen the appeal in watching stupid people charge headfirst into obviously dangerous situations, spend the runtime being helpless and getting themselves hounded and tortured and tormented by inhuman monstrosities, only to inevitably die in ludicrously horrible ways.  She's always watched those films in disbelief, swearing that - even if supernatural/sci-fi/horror falderal like that existed - no one couldactuallybe that stupid in real life.  She probably should have remembered all of that before following an idiot marshal into an obviously dangerous insane asylum, chasing an anonymous report of experiments and abuses and Things Mankind Should Never Tamper With.Robin'sinthe horror movie now - all the danger and torment and impossibilities brought to life.  Now she just needs to see if she can survive it.





	Into the Jaws, Into the Mouth, and Deeper Into Hell

**Author's Note:**

> _Alright, quick disclaimer, particularly to anyone who might not be familiar with the Outlast series:_
> 
> _This is going to be messed up. Seriously. I am combining two franchises that love to feature murder, torture, mutilation, physical and sexual violence, mind rape, actual rape, general bad-touching, all kinds of bad-wrongness, seriously messed up religious themes/religions of evil, and more evil lurking in the heart of man than even The Shadow knows. On one hand I'm genuinely surprised that there aren't more crossovers between them. On the other hand I suspect that most people have things called "standards" that I lack. You have officially been warned._
> 
> _Welp, nod to decency out of the way... oh my land y'all I had so much fun writing this! Two of my favorite game franchises fitting themselves together so horribly well and just in time for Halloween! It's terrible and I'm a terrible person and I regret nothing!_
> 
> _And so, for your viewing [dis]pleasure, I give you - basically the begining of Outlast with Far Cry 5 characters! It's FarOut! No... no that sounds terrible. FarLast - no that's **worse**. Ummm... Wait. Wait I've got it. Everybody... welcome to **OutCry**! Buckle up and please enjoy! (Chapter warnings in the End Notes)_

The first thing that registers is that the world’s spinning and rocking around her, far off and confusing and disorienting all at once, like she’s been wrapping up in mountains of cloth and been tossed into a rickety little boat on storming waters. The second thing that registers is the smell – rot and filth and other delightful things she doesn’t care to name. The third thing is the taste of copper and acid in her mouth. The fourth is the steadily growing full-body agony. 

The fifth is the realization that she’s well and truly _fucked_.

Coughing, gagging, trying to expel the pool of blood that’s filled up her mouth one way or another, Deputy Robin Baird – resident rookie of the Hope County Sheriff’s Department – forces her eyes open.

Which is a terrible decision, really, but that seems to be the nature of the day thus far.

She’s pretty sure she’s currently lying flat on her back on the ground floor of St. Francis Asylum for the Criminally Insane, pretty sure she’s got at least a concussion, and pretty sure that there’s corpses hanging from the ceiling all around her like particularly ghoulish modern art installations. 

If this is what passes for art therapy in Hope County’s resident mental institute, she’s also pretty sure that someone needs to get their medical license revoked with _extreme_ prejudice.

She’s also also pretty sure that Burke had _not_ mentioned the possibility of things being this bad when he’d conscripted them, so she going to have to say “screw you” procedure and respecting the chain of command and all that malarkey and give the marshal one _hell_ of a bitching out when –

Shit.

Burke.

Burke is fucking _dead_.

Unbidden the image of the Marshal – all tore up and chewed on and hanging on a giant ass hook like a rack of ribs – floods back into her mind, followed right after by a flood of vomit that she just barely manages to roll over in time for, the mix of bile and partially digested protein bars spilling out of her mouth and onto the concrete floor instead of getting caught in her throat and suffocating her.

Burke is… dead. He’d… they’d…

_Fuck._

She pukes again, white hot agony blooming behind her eyes and blinding her, similar waves of pain sweeping through her body and concentrating in the back of her skull where she’s pretty damn sure she can feel blood – _please oh please just be blood_ – making her hair sticky and trickling down the back of her neck.

Burke had shown up on the doorstep of the Hope County Sheriff’s Department, bearing the news that Very Bad Things were going down inside the Asylum thanks to some anonymous source inside St Francis who’d – for some reason – decided to contact the US Marshals about it. They’d had rumors, of course – the usual flood of horror stories and conspiracy theories that rose up in places like Hope County and around places like St Francis, and some of them had even been from people _other_ than Zip Kupka and Larry Parker, but they’d never had any actual _evidence_ before. Not enough to actually check the place out anyway. Not until Marshal Burke and his anonymous whistleblower.

Burke, who’d insisted that they go right on into the asylum – never mind that the place was suspiciously dark and quiet, or that there was a fleet of abandoned SUVs of a decidedly suspicious nature outside the building, or that there wasn’t a sign of life to be found _anywhere_. Burke, who’d taken Sheriff Whitehorse and Robin around the building looking for a way in, leaving Staci and Joey behind with the jeep, trying to get someone on the radio to see about getting some backup. Burke, who’d gone up a rickety patchwork of scaffolding and into an upper story window like he was John McClane or something, a furiously swearing Whitehorse going after the idiot out of a sense of obligation and a sickly silent Robin going after her sheriff out of a sense of loyalty. Burke, who’d been nowhere to be seen when they made it inside the building, when they’d started making their way deeper inside, when they’d seen something go blitzing down a hallway and Whitehorse had given chase, Robin on his heels, only for them to get separated when the floor suddenly gave out under her and she went plunging down a floor, Whitehorse shouting down at her before something… some _thing_ suddenly _yanked_ him away from the hole and she couldn’t get up to him and couldn’t hear him or anything anymore and she’d finally looked around for a way back to him and realized the room she was in looked like Hannibal Lector and Jackson Pollock had gotten together on a drugged up interior-decorating spree, blood and guts and bits of… of _people_ scattered all around the room, words painted on the walls and floors in a variety of fluids, sweet little notes about “Sinners” and “Heretics” and “Weak” and all the sins listed out and –

Burke, who’d led them straight into a fucking horror movie brought to life.

Burke, who was dead.

Dead and partially eaten and hung up on a hook, very probably by the same scarred up mountain-man looking _giant_ that had come right the hell out of nowhere and thrown her like a ragdoll through a window and all the way down to the ground floor lobby.

Which, _ow_ , by the way.

She pukes a third time, then trails off gagging and dry heaving while her body tries to get the message that there’s nothing left to expel, and finally manages to sort of shuffle-crawl a few feet away from her own vomit – not that anywhere else smells all that much better – before collapsing back to the ground, body going over-cooked noodle limp as lights and black spots flash behind her eyes like the Fourth of July.

Yep. She’s fucked.

She lies there for… an amount of time, waiting for the giant mountain man to come after her and finish what he started, waiting for some _thing_ like what took Whitehorse to come for her next, waiting for some nebulous horror or something to rear its ugly head and… 

Waiting to die.

It’s quite the surprise when nothing _does_ show up to make her dead, really.

Slowly – horribly, terrifyingly, _painfully_ slowly – she starts to get her body back under control. The pain’s still well within the confines of agonizing, but its faded just enough – probably her brain refusing input from those nerves and such out of necessity – that she can start to push past it, her vision’s starting to clear up bit by bit, and the world’s still spinning but at a much more manageable tilt – less fair-ride during a nine-point earthquake and more really bad bender. All of which is good because she’s starting to think clearly and get her bearings. And all of which is also bad for the exact same reasons.

Fuck. She needs to _move_.

_Now_.

Gagging still and swearing inside her throbbing head, Robin slowly manages to get herself up to her hands and knees, manages to hold herself up for a few agonizing seconds, then forces herself up to her feet. She sways, staggers, nearly collapses back to the ground, but _somehow_ manages to stay upright, shaking and trembling and gasping like a newborn fawn.

She swallows, regrets that, and narrowly manages to avoid throwing up again. Spits. Swears again, this time whispered out into the charnel house of horrors around her, the sound echoing through the otherwise silent room. Swears again inside her head and waits, wide eyed and terrified, for something to come after the sound. Tries not to sob in relief when nothing does come for her. Then, finally, she takes a step forward. Then another. And another.

She needs to _get out_. Get to Staci and Joey – _be ok, please, please, **please** be ok_ – and get help. Get it _fast_ and get back faster and _pray_ that Whitehorse will be –

Fuck.

Robin forces herself to keep inching forward, eyes burning for reasons that have nothing to do with the pain and/or head trauma. 

She needs to get out and get help. She _has_ to. No matter how much she wants to stay, to try and find Whitehorse, she just _can’t_. Robin may be reckless and headstrong and stubborn and a hell of a lot of other things but she’s not oblivious. She is capable of self-assessment. She knows when she’s in over her head. And right now she knows that she’s no good to her sheriff but as a lifeline to the outside, so no matter how much it tears her up inside to leave she’s _got_ to.

So she does. She limps her way across the room, trying not to get distracted – get paralyzed – by the corpses that decorate the building and the words and messages scrawled over every flat surface and the steady agony of a twenty-foot freefall. Limps forward and keeps her eyes on the reception-desk-area-place thing, _prays_ that there’s some way of getting the doors unlocked from there because if there isn’t…

_Just keep moving, Robby Red. Just keep on keepin’ on._

Finally she stumbles to a halt behind the front most desk, steps over half a person without letting herself think about what she’s doing, and lets herself collapse into a disorientingly unaffected office chair in front of a somehow still lit up computer monitor, the blue light shining over the blood spattered desk and the collection of papers scattered across it.

In particular, her eyes light on a little yellow post-it note, hanging off the bottom of the monitor.

_“Sandy, door controls at lobby desk still busted, code for second floor control room is 268524, – T”_

Robin stares blankly at the cheery little post-it note. Then, slowly and rather numbly, she leans back in the chair and her eyes automatically track up to the computer screen.

There’s a cat on the monitor. A tiny little lilac Scottish Fold kitten, all fat and fluffy and big eyed, staring up at her from out of a laundry basket. It’s fucking adorable. It’s fucking _mocking_ her and she has never in her life wanted to flip off anything as much as she does this image of a tiny adorable kitten. 

Somewhere in the distance something makes a _sound_ (that’s really the only way she can categorize it). Somewhere very nearby there’s a sort of wet slurp-thud noise as one of the hanging corpses’ insides finally lose the battle with gravity and go spilling out onto the floor. The _smell_ of the place is finally getting all the way into her senses and her stomach is trying to figure out if its capable of puking anything else up. And, as her eyes track very slowly and very tiredly over to the impenetrable security doors that – theoretically – lead outside, she’s pretty damn sure that the half-a-person she stepped over to get to the chair is leaking fluids that are getting all over her shoes.

Slowly Robin’s eyes fall closed.

“Well fuck me then.”

##############

The trip up to the second floor control room goes… better than she’d expected. 

From a certain point of view.

And given a certain definition of “better.”

She doesn’t _die_ for one thing.

So there’s that.

She also took the time – and risk – to rifle through some of the desk drawers down in the lobby, which netted her a bag of trail mix, a bottle of water, and some aspirin, which has made the whole movement thing a hell of a lot easier, _and_ she’s managed to avoid throwing up again. Which, given some of the stuff that she’s passed on her way upwards, she feels is quite the accomplishment.

Seriously, how can one building contain so many organs, entrails, and fluids?

And how has her life turned into something where she has to _ask_ that question?

She hasn’t seen anyone – _**alive**_ – since her run in with Giant Mountain-Man, which is simultaneously a relief and _really_ terrifying, because she keeps hearing things echoing throughout the building and some of them sound human and _all_ of them sound horrible. 

Robin tries not to think about it – tries to focus on going forward, on working her way as quickly and quietly towards the control room as she can.

She also tries not to think about what she’ll do if she manages to reach the control room but can’t _get in_ to it.

One horror at a time.

Then, about a half an hour – _maybe?_ – after she came back to consciousness in the lobby, she rounds a corner and finds herself staring down a long hallway.

There’s someone in it.

Robin freezes, cold panic washing over her as she stares at the very much alive figure that’s sitting between her and where she needs to go, muttering and rambling and sobbing to himself – pretty sure it’s a him, _sounds_ male at least, sort of – from a rocking ball on the floor. He’s a particularly pathetic sight – painfully thin and moving like he’s hurt. He’s also buck-ass naked, covered in blood, and cradling a corpse. 

So.

Her mind kicks into high gear, options running past her at a breakneck pace. He hasn’t seen her – _yet_ – and he doesn’t look particularly… hale, so she’s pretty sure she could get away without any trouble. Only she doesn’t have a clue about the layout of the place, has been following occasional signs to make her way to the control room, and she’s got no idea if there’s another way to get where she needs to go. She could try and subdue him – again, he doesn’t look like he’s going to be winning any fights. But _she’s_ also not at the top of her game, and the guy in front of her probably won’t have anything like self-preservation instincts or standards holding him back if it comes to a fight. She _does_ still have her service pistol if it absolutely comes down to it, but… No. Hell no. Even if it wasn’t for the noise and even if there wasn’t a little voice in the back of her head saying that if she runs into Giant Mountain Man again she will very probably need _all_ of her bullets to have any kind of chance… No. No she’s not shooting anyone unless she has _absolutely_ no choice.

Robin’s yet to fire her pistol in service of the law, and she _really_ doesn’t want her first shooting to involve some guy who’s so far out of his mind that he probably can’t see straight. Some guy who _should_ have been getting actual medical care and instead apparently got turned into a lab rat or something by a bunch of doctors who thought no one would care about a bunch of mentally ill criminals. No one deserves that.

So backtracking’s out. Fighting’s out. Shooting is _definitely_ out.

Which just leaves…

Quiet as she can, Robin edges forward, hugging the wall the guy’s facing away from as she makes her way down the hall.

He looks completely out of it – fixated on the corpse he’s rocking back and forth and whatever madness is spilling out from inside his head. If she’s careful enough there’s a _chance_ that –

About three feet past him the guy wheels around like a snake and stares directly up at her.

Robin freezes – shock and horror and blind frustration lancing through her – up against the wall, breath knotting up in her throat and stomach surging up again as she waits for the guy to come at her and then –

The guy _screams_ – the sound high and terrified and horrifyingly childlike – and throws himself back, rail thin limbs scrambling across the floor as he tries to get away from _her_ , curling up into a tiny ball of naked person as he buries his head in his hands and starts _sobbing_ from sheer terror.

Robin stares down at the guy, still frozen and still sick and horrified but for entirely new reasons. 

She needs to go. Needs to get down to the control room and get the doors open, then get out and get help. She doesn’t have _time_ for anything else. _Whitehorse_ doesn’t have time for anything else. She needs to go. 

Now.

_Damn it._

Slowly, Robin pulls herself off the wall and takes a single, cautious step towards the sobbing naked man. “Sir? Are you alright?” _Are you al- seriously?! Of all the stupid fucking questions – why are people always hardwired to ask that when dealing with someone who obviously **isn’t**?!_ She winces, but her internal flagellation is cut short when the guy’s sobbing and twitching dies down a little. So, biting down on the medley of _why_ inside her head, she takes another step closer. “Are you hurt? Is there anything I can do to help?”

The words hang in the air for a moment, the guy’s sobbing dying down into soft, broken whimpers. Then, slowly, he turned just a little – just enough that Robin gets an actual look at his face and nearly throws up again because the guy’s face is…

_Fuck._

His face looks like a wax doll that someone’s left too close to a fire – all… all _melty_ ,the skin of his forehead slid down entirely over his left eye and his left ear just… gone. Something’s happened around his mouth and nose too, a mix of that melted skin and a fuckton of horrific cuts and stitches that pull the areas together and leave his teeth exposed so that the guy looks like he’s got the beginnings of a muzzle, like somebody’s tried mixing up person and naked mole rat features or something. The right side of his face is cut to fuck too, where it looks like somebody decided to cut him open again and again only to sew him back together for no discernible reason. There’s a few wisps of gray hair left on his – raw, almost _scalped_ looking – head, but otherwise the guy’s body is totally hairless, covered in the same melty skin and purposeless cuts and sutures and his one remaining eye… 

Robin stares at the guy – into his whited-over, tear filled eye – and it takes everything she has to not burst into tears of her own.

_What **the fuck** is this place?_

Biting down the hysteria and horror and the rage, Robin tries to put on her best ‘comfort-the-victim’ face and, slow as can be, extends her palm-up hand to the guy. The guy sobs frantically, flinches away, and she freezes. “It’s alright.” _Liar._ “It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you.” She does her best to keep her voice soft and calm, keeps her hand still and welcoming, and after a second the guy stops panic quite so badly. “It’s alright,” she lies again, very, _very_ slowly holding her hand out to him. “I’m here to help.”

The guy’s sobbing has stopped, only a few horrible sounding sniffles left as he stares at her through a cage of skeletal limbs. There’s a long moment where his eye, white and glassy, just sort of wavers around aimlessly, probably not really _seeing_ anything. Then, finally, his gaze starts to sharpen, to actually _look_ at her and –

_**“Sinner!”** _

She’s slammed backwards before she even has a chance to comprehend what’s happening, her head almost cracking against the thinly carpeted floor as a pair of skeletal hands and blade-like fingernails clamp down on her throat. Instinctively her hands come up, ignoring the stranglehold the guy’s got at her throat as she shoves and claws at his face, trying frantically to get at his eye, legs kicking as she tries to unbalance him or get a knee into his groin, snarling and flailing and trying to throw him _off_.

She might as well be fighting against solid stone.

_**“Jezebel!”**_ Spit and blood sprays out, splatters down against her face as the guy screams down at her, teeth snapping as he tries to get down close enough to bite. _**“Filthy fucking whore! One of them! You’re one of them!”**_ Impossibly strong arms lift her and slam her back down against the ground, hangs digging in and in and into her throat, seemingly oblivious to her desperate attempts to break free. _**“Get them out! Get them out! Get them out of my skin!”**_ He lifts her again, teeth barely kept away by her scrambling hands, and _screams_ , _**“Take your sins back!”**_

Her vision is going black, and there’s a horrible, crushing pressure at her throat making some blurry corner of her mind realize that he’s probably moments away from crushing her larynx.

_She’s going to –_

She lashes out again, frantically, blindly, and where her thumb brushes against something soft and wet she _shoves_.

The guy _screams_ again, this time in absolute _agony_ , and the crushing weight on her throat eases _just_ enough for her to struggle free. 

The second his hands are off her throat she moves, doesn’t waste time trying to catch her breath or her bearings, just scuttles back as fast as she can with her hands, still kicking wildly with her feet. Her back hits the wall and she uses it, scrambles upright, blindly yanking her gun free and pointing it in the direction of the screams and whimpers, holding it towards the sounds and following the wall away as her vision flickers and flares wildly. Just about the time her vision starts to clear a terrified shriek punctuates the sounds of rage and pain, and she finally manages to refocus her gaze on the guy, cowering away from her yet again as he flails around and claws blindly at his own face.

Choking, gasping desperately, Robin keeps the gun fixed on the guy as she limps away, back pressed up against the wall and keeping her upright as she moves down the hall and towards the control room.

She’s nearing the end of the hall, approaching the turn that _should_ take her where she needs to go, when the guy goes suddenly still. For a long, horrifying moment, she freezes too, waiting for him to charge again. But then, after a long shudder, she watches as the guy crawls back to the corpse he had been cradling when she first arrived, pulling the broken body up into his arms and rocking it as he starts to sob and mutter and ramble to the corpse all over again.

For a long, sickening moment, she can’t move. Can’t pull her eyes away from the sight before her.

Then, painfully slowly, she forces her feet to move again, rounding the corner with a muted panic and making her way as fast as she can away from the guy and the corpse.

Robin keeps her eyes and ears a lot more attuned to her surroundings after that.

She doesn’t put her gun away.

##############

The world kindly decides to throw a couple more scares between her and her destination – sudden screams, distant sobbing, hysterical ranting from behind a mercifully locked door, and a rhythmic wet thudding that turns out to be some totally normal looking inmate who’s beating his own head to a pulp against a wall.

And blood.

Dear God above there’s so much blood.

Robin keeps moving, quiet and quick as she can. She tries not to let the sounds get to her. They still make her heart stop and her pulse thunder and her stomach turn wildly. She tries – apparently not having learned her lesson – to get the guy to stop beating his head in. She gets him to stop for three seconds, after which he stops staring blankly in her direction and goes over to pound his head against a different wall.

She tries not to see all the blood, except to keep from slipping in it.

She’s partially successful.

By the time she finally – _finally_ – rounds the last corner and sees the words “Control” down the hall, every cell in her body is completely on edge – handily complimenting the searing agony that’s lighting up every nerve, the thunderstorm pounding in her skull and lighting up behind her eyes, and the _scream_ that’s been building and building and has a stranglehold on the inside of her throat.

The _one_ good thing – aside from the fact that she hasn’t been attacked again ( _yet_ ) – is that at least she’s finally starting to move easier – forward momentum and adrenaline and sheer desperation making her limbs work despite all the pain and injury.

_Three cheers for blind panic, huh?_

And speaking of panic, the closer she gets to the door the more nervous she gets – some quiet little voice in the back of her mind (that sounds way the hell too much like her childhood friend Carlos Flynn) reminding her of all the horror films she’s ever watched under duress, all the moments where the terrified teens or desperately determined female lead get within inches of their target only for the monster/serial killer/zombie horde to come busting out of the wall like an evil Kool-Aid Man.

Robin inches forward, keeping a firm grip on her gun and her breathing, silently swears at her inner Carlos to shut his damn mouth, and tries her damnedest to not think about any resemblance she might have to those desperately determined female leads.

She finally makes it to the door, fighting back the still growing scream and trying to get her pulse to quiet down as she puts one ear up against the door and tries to determine whether there’s anything inside. Either there’s nothing – _please_ – or there’s nothing alive – _could honestly live with that right now_ – or there’s something inside that’s really good at being quiet and waiting – _please oh please no_. She takes a second to check the area around her again, looking for any sign of anything and listening as intently as she can to make sure all the horrifying sounds she’s hearing are _away_ from where she’s at. When nothing jumps out at her – figuratively or literally, _fuck_ – then, finally, hand shaking and trembling like anything, she reaches down to the key-pad and taps out 268524. There’s a split second of agony. Then a little light turns green with a painfully loud -beep- and, heart up in her throat, she wraps her fingers around the door handle – _please God, please be unlocked, please open, please oh please oh please_ – and…

The handle turns, and with a little push the door opens on an empty room of monitors and control panels.

Robin’s legs nearly go out from under her from sheer _relief_.

She limps inside as quickly as she can, checking the room rapidly before pushing the door silently closed behind her. There’s no lock inside that she can see, so she grabs one of the little wheely desk chairs, shoves it under the handle, and _prays_ before turning to the monitors.

She makes herself take a moment, actually looks at the set up in front of her instead of just pounding wildly at any button within reach like her id wants to do, because the _last_ thing she needs right now is to accidentally unseal the Vault of Uber Super Mutant Experiments or shut down the containment field around the T-Virus Incubator or… or _something_. Who the hell even knows what all the monsters running this place have been getting up to, or what buttons might unleash a whole cavalcade of new horrors upon the world. Besides which is the fact that computers are… not her strong suit. To say the least.

In the end it probably only takes half a minute to work out what she needs to do, but by the time that’s passed she’s nearly soaked through her clothes with terror sweat, enough so that it actually takes a couple tries for her to hit the right keys, to punch in the right commands, but at last… 

She does it.

Robin stares, actually slack jawed, at one of the monitors in front of her as the security doors in the lobby open.

She did it.

She can _get **out**_.

She can get _help_.

She just has to get back down to the lobby, and she’s home free.

Gasping, shaking, lips twitching wildly as she heaves a hysterical little laugh, Robin straightens up and turns back to –

The door _shatters_ open, the flimsy little chair flying wildly away along with the hail of splinters, and she doesn’t even have time to react before someone’s rocketing into the tiny room and slamming her down to the ground by her throat, and for a second time that night Robin finds herself desperately struggling against a naked, mutilated, slavering inmate.

_To get trapped and choked out by one crazy naked man may be regarded as a misfortune;_ her rattled and fear-drowned brain supplies unhelpfully as she claws fruitlessly at her attacker, _to get trapped and choked out by **another** looks like carelessness._

Unlike the last one this Naked Guy isn’t screaming at her, nor does he seem to want to bash her skull in or crush her throat. Unfortunately, also unlike the last one, this Naked Guy seems to be cognizant enough to dodge all her attempts at eye gouging. Which would probably seem unfair if she had the mental wherewithal to feel anything but _terror_.

Naked Guy’s just holding her in place, hands wrapped tight around her throat and legs pinning her to the floor, staring down at her wide eyed and grinning as she struggles ineffectually against his – literally – inhuman strength. Her nails scratch at his face – and _fuck_ , it looks like somebody _bisected_ his face perfectly, then sewed it right back together again, only just too tightly so the skin’s splitting and getting infected around the seams – and he just tilts his head back, laughing meanly – the sound rattling and raspy and _sickening_ in its cruel hunger – as she misses a shot at his eyes. Slowly – deliberately slowly – his hands start to close tighter and tighter on her throat, her struggles getting wilder as her vision starts flashing between white and black and –

Everything goes white and –

The world starts to flicker back into focus, sounds rising up through an extremely out of place roaring ocean and stars exploding inside her eyes and –

Something’s snuffling against her neck, a feel like there’s bugs crawling on her skin and a sound disconcertingly like a rooting pig until something _wet_ runs over her ear and –

She _feels_ – rather than hears – the cry struggle out from her throat, and she tries to shove the tongue the mouth the face the man away from her skin but that’s when she realizes her arms are pinned above her head, an impossibly strong hand crushing and grinding her wrists together and –

There’s another sick laugh in her ear, the grips on her wrists and on her throat tightening for a moment. Then the hand at her throat relaxes suddenly, just enough for the world to clear up a little, for the lilting sing-song words to translate clearly. “Pretty pretty, soft and silky.” He nuzzles against her hair, giggling to himself as she struggles, then abruptly moves and licks a long stripe from the corner of her lip up her face, giggling louder when she _screams_ and flails. “So sweet, tasty treat.” His tongue swipes over her face again, a mirrored stripe on the other side, before he ducks his head down and licks around and over and under the hand on her throat. She screams again, wild and strangled against his hold, tries again and again to throw him off, to get free. All she gets is another laugh and a sickening roll of him against her hip. 

The panic is rising, higher and higher and higher until, suddenly, it can’t go any higher and it just turns into _**rage**_.

Robin _slams_ up against him, throws everything she’s got into it, and _somehow_ – maybe he was getting complacent, maybe it shocks him – she gets a hand free, swings her fist down _hard_ against the side of his neck once, twice, three times and –

The world erupts into white once more as he slams her head down into the floor again, the world filtering back more slowly and full of the taste and the smell of copper as his maimed face and whited-over eyes stare down at her in pure _hate_ , spit flying down onto her face and teeth exposed as he squeezes her wrists and her throat and snarls, “Stupid _whore_! Couldn’t just be a good girl for me –”

Through the haze over her vision Robin thinks she sees something – a shadowy shape looming up behind Naked Guy.

She can’t process it, can’t really process anything around her, sight and sound fading away until suddenly – painfully abrupt – the hand at her throat is _gone_.

Robin _gasps_. Chokes. Gasps again through the coughing and retching that wracks her body, each fought for breath raw and agonizing. She’s vaguely, distantly aware of sounds, of a struggle of some kind taking place near her, but her mind won’t focus on it, won’t focus on _anything_ but trying to get another breath through her wrecked throat and into her starved lungs. 

She starts coming back to her senses as the sounds are dying down, starts to realize that she’s somehow rolled over onto her side, curled her knees up towards her chest protectively as she gasps and coughs, that there’s tears streaming down her face and that the back of her head is dangerously hot and wet and sticky, that the world is spinning and her vision’s kaleidoscoping and fuck she’s pretty sure taking so many blows to the head is really _bad_ and –

Her vision starts to clear up just in time for Naked Guy to slam down on to the ground next to her, gaping sockets where his eyes used to be.

Robin stares into the empty sockets for a second, feeling the weight of another presence in the room and just… waiting. 

Nothing happens.

Finally, slowly and shakily and scared as hell, she pulls her eyes away from Naked Guy’s corpse and looks up.

_Well,_ she thinks, a little hysterically, _at least this one’s wearing pants._

The man standing over her is just staring down placidly, brows furrowed just a little like he’s not entirely sure what he’s seeing.

She can relate.

He looks almost… normal. Or, at least, as normal as someone can look standing inside a building that decided to put the insane right back into insane asylum. He hasn’t been mutilated like either of the naked guys, doesn’t seem to be prone to self-harm like the head-banging guy. He doesn’t even look injured. He’s tall. Fit, in a lean, hungry sort of way. As her vision clears a little more she can see that his skin’s all marked up, but it all looks deliberate – tattoos scrawled artistically across lightly tanned skin. There’s a lot of skin, largely because he doesn’t seem to be wearing a shirt, or shoes for that matter. But, again, he has _pants_ , which is automatically registering as a _massive_ positive in her reeling mind. He’s also got hair, unlike everyone but Giant Mountain Man – _please don’t show up again, not now_ – that she’s seen so far; dark hair that looks like it’s been pulled back somehow and reasonably well trimmed facial hair. Weirdest of all is that he’s wearing glasses – large, rounded glasses with yellow lenses. It’s _such_ a random detail – so very specific and pointed and distinct and out of place in the _insanity_ around her – that her brain gets caught up on it, gets stuck trying and failing to make sense of those yellow glasses. Robin can’t really get past them. Can’t get her brain to start _working_ and processing things again. Can’t do anything but stare up at the strange man with the yellow glasses.

He keeps stares right back down at her, even when he moves.

Mr. Glasses sinks down onto the ground in front of her in one fluid, sinuous motion, kneeling easily above her and still staring like he’s trying to work out some kind of puzzle. Robin sort of feels – very distantly – like she should be tensing or something, like she should be deeply concerned by yet _another_ strange man in a nightmare hospital for the criminally insane looming above her. She can’t though – there’s just… something about the guy, some kind of borderline inhuman aura of peace coming off of him that’s easing away her panic before it can surface. Also, she’s dealing with severe oxygen deprivation and head trauma. So.

She does flinch when he reaches out for her, the violent motion slowing his hands momentarily.

“It’s alright, my child.” His voice – cutting suddenly through the eerie silence of the control room – is warm and soft and smooth, lightly accented with something Southern and just _right_ on her wrecked nerves, like sunshine on a cold day or honey over burned skin or some equally fanciful simile. Whatever the hell is going on with it locks her down, leaves her unable to do anything but whimper brokenly when his hands move towards her chest again, only for the sound to trail off in confusion when he starts buttoning her shirt back _up_ for her. Robin’s frozen again, staring up at the guy as he fixes her clothes, torn between trying to remember when the hell her shirt had come undone and trying to figure what the hell is going on and –

“I saw you.” His voice is still all soft and warm and smooth and whatever, his expression still beatific, but there’s _something_ in the eyes behind those yellow lenses, a steadily burning fire and piercing intensity as he looks at her. “In the halls.” He’s finished with her shirt, head canting ever so slightly to the side as he stares. “With the sinner.”

_Wait, what?_

Robin stares up at Mr. Glasses, something cold and clear slowly rising up through the spell of warm calm he’s weaving.

“You showed him…” If he notices a change in her the guy doesn’t react to it. Just keeps staring at her for a long moment before his hands start moving again. “Mercy.” Something brushes against her cheek, soft and impossibly gentle and making her flinch and whimper again, and it takes a few passes for her to realize that he’s wiping Naked Guy’s spit off her face with an actual fucking handkerchief.

Her vision’s starting to fully clear up, letting her properly focus in on the guy, confirming her earlier blurry assessments and… well… 

Under any other circumstances, she thinks a little hysterically, she would find Mr. Glasses _ridiculously_ attractive.

Somehow, that little detail scares her more than anything that’s happened yet.

He’s finished cleaning up her face and his hand is moving again, tucking the handkerchief back into his pants pocket like it’s a perfectly normal day, and her eyes follow the movement involuntarily and –

And –

_Oh fuck me running, that can’t be a good sign._

Robin’s eyes flicker over Mr. Glasses bare skin, taking in the selection of tattoos that _aren’t_ tattoos – the _Sloth_ that’s been carved deep into his chest, the _Greed_ on his bicep, the _Lust_ – _no no no no no no no no no no nonono please no no thank you no_ – that’s still raw and bleeding above the line of his pants, and the scattering of other words and images and shapes that have been cut into him amidst all the tattoos.

His hand rises again, and again if he notices her growing panic he doesn’t let on. Just keeps speaking with that impossibly, uncannily soothing voice, like Mr. Rodgers on a day trip down to hell. “You were faced with sin and showed compassion.” One large, calloused, impossibly gentle hand cups her cheek, lifts her head so her gaze is drawn back up and she’s meeting his eyes again. His thumb is stroking gently under her eye – slick and wet for some reason – and something wrapped around his hand – she suddenly realizes is a rosary – taps against her cheek as he stares through her eyes and down into her soul. 

“Who are you?”

Robin stares back, frozen under his yellow-tinted stare, all the warm comfort gone and leaving her more scared than she’s been in her life.

Again again he doesn’t seem to notice or be bothered by her lack of response, his eyes fixed on hers for a few moments longer before they break away – _thank you God_ – to sweep searchingly over her. There’s a little hum of consideration when his finger brushes over the little tattoo behind her left ear, the trio of ravens woven into a circular Celtic knot that she’d gotten when she graduated high school, when she and her friends had all been drunk enough to think getting tattoos was the best idea ever and that she alone hadn’t ended up regretting. There’s a brief flicker behind his eyes when he takes in old scars and new cuts and bruises, a mix of clinical sympathy and distant hunger that makes her stomach clench. There’s a split second where her heart _stops_ , breath turning to ice in her lungs when his gaze lands on her badge and his eyes _narrow_ sharply, lip curling ever so slightly upwards into a vicious sneer. She feels like a bug, pinned under a microscope, and all she can do is lie there, still too weak and very nearly broken as she waits for the scalpel to come down and –

He gasps softly. Jolts. Eyes going wide and mouth falling open as he tilts his head to the side like he’s listening to something. His eyes fly back up to her face, inhumanly quick, and if she thought his earlier stare was intense then the one she gets pinned under know is _consuming_.

Robin can’t breathe. Can’t move. Can’t do anything but lie there, caught in his gaze, as he looks down on her and –

He smiles.

Her heart stops.

“Of course.” The smile on his face and the brightness in his eyes could light up a room – and probably burn down the whole building along with it. His hands come back up again, one caressing her cheek while the other lightly cradles her jaw. She probably _could_ flinch this time but suddenly she doesn’t quite dare to. “You were sent here…” There’s the slightest brush of a thumb against the corner of her mouth. “For me.”

_What._

He’s still speaking, religious fervor coiling through his honey smooth voice and elevating his expression, sheer _euphoria_ washing over his face as he sighs in elation, “An _Angel_ – sent to bear witness to my great work and help shepherd our children into the new Eden.”

_No. No seriously, **what?**_

Robin’s body is finally catching up with her terrified brain, starting to tremble as she stares in unblinking horror and tries with everything she’s got to not start hyperventilating or throw up again.

She has to _get out_.

Somehow.

She forces her gaze off him, her eyes darting wildly around the room for something – _anything_ – that’ll give her a shot at separating herself from the unhinged religious zealot – _he’s a crazy bad-touching priest, he’s an **actual** crazy bad-touching priest, how the actual **fuck**_ – who’s apparently decided that she’s literally God’s gift to him.

And there, just a few feet away from them and right on next to the busted open door, she sees it.

Her gun.

Robin’s fingers twitch, flexing against the worn down carpeting, then curl up into a fist. Inside her boots she gets her toes to curl, then gets a whole foot to move. Every movement hurts, sends shocks of light and shadow dancing behind her eyes, but she makes herself do it anyway. She makes her arm – the right one, the one that’s _away_ from Mr. Glasses – move slowly, palm pressing down against the floor. He doesn’t notice. Doesn’t notice when she starts shifting her legs either, apparently too caught up in his elated rambling about “Eden” and “Salvation” and “Destiny” to notice that “his Angel” is getting ready to fucking _bolt_.

She just needs a _shot_. Just one moment where he’s distracted enough that she can make a break for it. If she can just get to her gun she can hold him off – _hopefully_ without having to _actually_ use it – and make her way back down, get the _fuck_ out of the place and –

The room abruptly falls silent, and her gaze snaps back to where he’s focused down on her with a cold, inhuman stare.

For a few literally petrifying seconds he holds her with his gaze. 

Then, slowly, his head turns away.

Towards the open door.

Towards her gun.

Fingers twitch against her skin, digging slowly into her jaw until she’s tearing up and gasping in staccato bursts of pain.

Yet again he doesn’t seem to notice. 

After a moment his head turns again, swinging back and around, gaze passing over her entirely as he looks over to the bank of monitors.

To the one with the unsealed front doors.

Then his eyes turn back to her, full of hurt and betrayal and _rage_ for a crushing moment. Then, just as she’s wondering if you can actually be suffocated with a look, his expression changes again. Softens, after a sort. Goes all sad and pitying and resigned as his fingers slowly relax, pull away from her throbbing jaw, and in one fluid, sinuous motion he rises to his feet, strides over and picks her gun up off the floor like it’s a squashed bug, looking at it in disgust before turning and –

“No!” The sound that rips its way out of her throat startles them _both_ , his head whipping around and eyes going wide and actually making him look _human_ for the first time. It also sets her throat on _fire_ , burning like bleach and making her gasp and cough and shake. Robin forces that irrelevance aside, forces her limbs under her, forces herself to rise. She makes it nearly onto all fours before her body gives out, sending her crashing right back down to the floor again, tears burning behind her eyes as she stares at _him_ , at the bank of monitors and all the little keys and buttons next to him, trying again – futilely – to get upright as she shakes and trembles and _pleads_ , “D-don’t…”

She watches the brief flicker of humanity dies away until the otherworldly serenity’s back, and he’s just staring at her again, cold and implacable. “This place is a crucible,” his honeyed voice is like steel, crushing her under the weight of his certainty and command, “meant to purify the sinners and heretics within and leave them pure and blameless before the eyes of God.” Eyes narrow behind those yellow lenses, and for a split second there’s a flash of _rage_ as he snarls,“ _No one_ can _leave_.”

And then he turns, forgoes any kind of precision and just _drives_ his fist into – _shit_ , drives his first _through_ the control panel, sparks rocketing into the air and alarms going off in the room and Robin’s eyes going even wider as she watches the monitor, watches the security doors in the lobby _slam_ shut and she’s only got a second to see it before _he_ grabs hold of the monitor and _rips_ it out of the wall, concrete and plaster exploding into the air alongside the sparks as the tall, lean man keeps _destroying_ , ripping concrete and steel and everything else in reach apart like tissue paper until there’s _nothing_.

She watches, crumpled on the floor like a broken doll, as he turns again. Watches as his eyes pan emotionlessly over her. Watches as the rage he’d only just displayed vanishes and he comes back to kneel beside her, inhumanly strong hands lifting her and moving her as gentle as anything until she’s propped up against a wall. His thumbs – now tacky with what she’s only just realizing is what’s left of Naked Guy’s _eyes_ – sweep over her cheeks, smearing vitreous and tears all over her face and that’s when she realizes that she’s crying. “Shh, shh shh…” He tucks a few stray locks of hair behind her ear before stroking the body of it lightly, shushing at her in the theoretically soothing way that only ever manages to do anything but soothe people. “Don’t be afraid. Everything will become clear.” His hands slide back down, cupping her face gently and lifting her chin so that she’s meeting his gaze again through a haze of tears and hopelessness. He smiles down at her. “In time.”

He leans down towards her and her heart stops again, eyes getting wider and wider, stomach roiling and heart seizing and _no, no no no no no you sonovabitch don’t you dare_ –

His lips brush against her forehead, achingly chaste and tender.

She wants to close her eyes. Wants to shut it all out. Shut _him_ out.

Instead she’s caught, frozen and staring as he presses their foreheads together, their breath mingling as he holds her face tenderly and hums softly – happy lilting notes that nearly rip her apart when she recognizes them as _Amazing Grace_.

There’s a new scream building in her throat, clawing up the raw tissue and tearing at the inside of her mouth and back of her teeth when his eyes slowly open, glowing like hellfire from behind those yellow lenses, and he _smiles_ – bright and pure and impossibly beautiful and _remember the Devil was once an Angel_ – as he purrs, “Welcome _home_ , my child.”

And then, with one last gentle kiss on the forehead, he stands, turns, and walks away.

##############

Robin’s not sure how long she sits there, slumped against a wall on the floor of the ruined control room, all alone but for Naked Guy’s corpse and the distant screams.

She stares at the doorway, half expecting Mr. Glasses the Sinister Minister to reappear, or Giant Mountain Man, or another Naked Guy. She listens to the screams and sobs and snatches of insanity that echo through the air, pleas for mercy and salvation and roars for vengeance and blood and the inhuman howls of the damned. She wonders how far she’ll have to go and how many stairs she’ll have to climb, how high she’ll need to get before the fall will be fatal.

She stares and she listens and she wonders and the tears fall, the icy cold on her skin sinks deeper and deeper into her, and she feels herself slowly drowning from the helplessness and despair.

She _is_ , more than she ever could have guessed, well and truly _fucked_.

And then, as that thought flitters through her mind, something familiar slowly reaches up and breaks through the desolation.

For a second everything fades into pure, untouched blankness.

And then every fiber of Deputy Robin Baird erupts into white hot _**rage**_.

Slowly, deliberately, shaking from pain and exhaustion and blind fury, Robin plants a hand against the wall, bares her teeth, and stands. She makes it vertical. Takes a breath. Takes a step forward. She doesn’t fall.

Robin takes another step, teeth grinding together as she blatantly refuses to topple over, eyes sweeping over the room. Nothing to the left of her but ruined tech and Naked Guy’s corpse, but to the right… She swallows hard, limping slowly over to the far right wall where a row of five old metal lockers stand.

The first one’s empty.

The second one’s empty.

The third one’s got a stack of porno mags, a duffle bag that smells like rank sweat, an open box of granola bars, and a first aid kit that brings tears flooding back into her eyes. She yanks it open, immediately grabs at the bottle of aspirin and dry swallows a handful of the pills without a second thought, then tears open a pack of antiseptic wipes and – swearing between clenched teeth – scrubs them against the split skin on the back of her head and all the other cuts she’s picked up in the last however long. That done she stares at the rest of the kit, mind racing as she eyes the rolls of bandages and gauze. Finally, swearing again, she yanks them out of the kit and starts shoving them into her pockets, along with the remaining pills and wipes before she tosses the depleted kit back into the locker, grabs the granola bars, and moves on.

The fourth locker is decidedly less helpful, containing only an implausibly tacky change of clothes that she glares at while choking down mouthfuls of cardboard flavored granola.

The fifth locker… At first she thinks it’s empty too, aside from a ratty old towel, only for something to glint out and catch the corner of her eye as she turns. Robin glances back, squinting into the locker and pushing the towel out of the way, and finds herself staring at an old hand-held camcorder. She stares at the device for a second, her shadowy reflection staring back from its lens. After a second she reaches out and picks it up, fingers working clumsily as she turns it over and starts fiddling with the buttons and toggles. Then, from underneath the ringing that’s still echoing inside her skull, she hears her inner Carlos Flynn swear up one side and down the other at her to stop being a Luddite and remember that he taught her how to work stupid old bricks like this and to turn the damn thing on already. Numbly she jumps to obey, flicking at a button on the side and watching as the little device flares to life. A glance shows its battery to be nearly full and quick test proves that the little wingy flippy thing – _wingy fli- Baird you absolute **philistine**_ – is working; in fact, the whole thing seems to be in great working order. And that’s when her eyes land on two little words. 

“Night Vision.”

Her mind races, flashing back to all the doorways and hallways that she’s passed that had been completely blacked out, visibility nonexistent even inches away. To the sheer _maze_ that makes up what she’s seen so far of the asylum. To the fact that her only flashlight is attached to her gun, now in the hands of a crazy man who thinks that he hears the voice of God.

Slowly, carefully, Robin closes the wingy flippy thing on the camcorder and slips one hand through the strap on the side. Then, snatching up the pair of batteries that were revealed when she took the camera and tucking them into a pocket, she turns and limps her way to the door.

The hall is empty when she edges her way out into it.

It’s not in the least comforting.

“Right then,” she sighs after a moment, her voice still raw and painful and discomfortingly loud as she stares down the hall she’d come from who knows how long ago. She takes a long, deep breath, letting it sweep through her body. The pain’s still there, still horrible, but between the pills and the rage that’s settled over her like an old familiar coat it shuts its mouth and lets her shove it down. She takes another breath, holds it for a second, then lets it out as her eyes narrow at the hall before her. “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,” she takes a step forward. “Into the valley of Death.” 

Somewhere in the distance something screams, wild and undulating and inhuman.

She takes another step, lips pulling back from her teeth. “Bring it on.”

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter Warnings - violence, mutilation, murder and death, mistreatment of mental patients, sexual assault, misogynistic language, adult type language, and copious bodily fluids.
> 
> _OutCry - Featuring The Deputy as sort-of Miles Upshur, Joseph Seed as sort-of Father Martin, and random Peggies as random Variants. Also, Jacob Seed as Sir-Not-Actually-Appearing-in-this-Fic/sort-of Chris Walker. (Sorry for all this Robin ~~actually I'm totally lying I'm not sorry at all I'm a horrible person~~ )_
> 
> _The title, and the little bit of dialogue Robin has near the end, are taken/paraphrased from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's_ The Charge of the Light Brigade. _There's also a little bit of appropriated dialogue from Oscar Wilde's_ The Importance of Being Earnest _while Robin's getting strangled the second time. Because mixing classic British poetry and theater with modern video games is how I role._
> 
> _Happy Halloween everyone! See you next time!_


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